Thirty nine years ago, three young black men were put in solitary confinement. Two are still there. Collectively they have spent more than 100 years in isolation, most of it at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
The “Angola 3″ maintain they were targeted for speaking out against inhumane treatment and racial segregation in the prison, and are now fighting for justice and recognition of their cruel, endless years in the hole.Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, originally convicted of unrelated cases of armed robbery, were convicted of the murder of a prison guard in 1972. Robert King, locked up for robbery, was also convicted of murder once he was in the prison. The most fortunate of the three, his conviction was overturned in 2001, and he was released after 29 years of isolation.
Meanwhile, the continued detention of Woodfox and Wallace showcases the failing of the Louisiana justice system. In a new report, Amnesty International notes that no physical evidence links Woodfox and Wallace to the murder. On top of that, potentially favorable DNA evidence was lost. The convictions were based on questionable inmate testimony. Best of all, it seems prison officials bribed the main eyewitness into giving statements against the men. Even the widow of the prison guard has expressed skepticism, saying in 2008,

“If they did not do this – and I believe that they didn’t – they have been living a nightmare for 36 years!”

I’m not sure what is most disturbing: that Louisiana has allowed these men to languish on seemingly-fabricated charges? That Woodfox and Wallace, now senior citizens with clean conduct records, are characterized as potential threats? Or that by holding the men under such tight quarters, the state has been in breach of its own prison policies for the past 15 years? The so called “nature of the original reason for lockdown” is no longer allowed to hold a prisoner in isolation, yet it has been invoked more than 150 times for these men.
Woodfox and Wallace watch life pass them from spaces barely larger than my bathroom. Eventually moved from Angola to two other prisons, they are allowed outside three hours a week in a small cage. For four more hours they can shower or walk alone along the corridor. Visits and telephone calls are few. According to their lawyers, this has contributed to a host of health problems, including osteoarthritis, hypertension and insomnia.
Woodfox’s murder conviction has been overturned twice, once by a U.S. district judge, and a State Judicial Commission recommended that Wallace’s conviction be reversed — but appeals and a refusal to see the light have kept the men in hell. As they fight their murder convictions, the Angola 3 are suing Louisiana authorities, asserting that their prolonged isolation is cruel and unusual punishment and violates the U.S. Constitution.
We can support their fight. Write LA Governor Bobby Jindal and, if he doesn’t act, contact U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Remind them that the United States has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the United Nations Convention against Torture, and that this insane confinement also contravenes the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.
This is not a hopeless case. As Robert King said,

“I do believe that there is something that can be done and a pro-active position in the case can help… The ripples in the pond are increasing and we need to see some waves… and these are the things that keep me going. I can see the waves coming from the ripples.”

The two teenagers met inside an ice cream factory through darting glances before roll call, murmured hellos as supervisors looked away and, finally, a phone number folded up and tossed discreetly onto the workroom floor.
It was the beginning of an Afghan love story that flouted dominant traditions of arranged marriages and close family scrutiny, a romance between two teenagers of different ethnicities that tested a village’s tolerance for more modern whims of the heart. The results were delivered with brutal speed.
This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.
When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security.
The riot, which lasted for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred and the two teenagers, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, confined to juvenile prison. Officially, their fates lie in the hands of an unsteady legal system. But they face harsher judgments of family and community...

As a longtime observer of James O'Keefe, the right-leaning provocateur best known for his hidden video stings, I am frustrated by the profile about him just published in TheNew York Times Magazine. The writer, Zev Chafets, capably sketches his subject's biography, and correctly intuits that any worthwhile feature story on the 27-year-old must grapple with the ethical questions raised by his activism. But the grappling is woefully incomplete, leaving readers unaware of the most damning critiques of O'Keefe's work and unable to render an informed judgment.
Totally absent is any mention of CNN Correspondent Abbie Boudreau, who contacted O'Keefe in 2010. At O'Keefe's bidding, she traveled to Maryland, expecting to interview him. But he and his team had other plans. It was their intention to lure her onto a boat where O'Keefe would be waiting below deck, hidden camera rolling. In planning documents obtained by CNN, there was a list of potential props: "condom jar, dildos, posters and paintings of naked women, fuzzy handcuffs."
O'Keefe later claimed he didn't approve such props. In any case, once he got her down there alone, he planned to make her uncomfortable by attempting to seduce her. Then he'd somehow humiliate Boudrea and embarrass CNN by releasing footage of the bizarre incident. It was averted at the last minute when a female member of O'Keefe's team became uncomfortable with the plan, and tipped off the reporter to what was intended. In the aftermath of the incident, which made national headlines when it happened, publisher Andrew Breitbart commented, "From what I've read about this script, though not executed, it is patently gross and offensive. It's not his detractors to whom he also owes this public airing. It's to his legion of supporters."
A profile writer can't include every detail of his subject's life. But surely a piece that touches on the propriety of O'Keefe's work and the evolution of his relationship with Breitbart should've mentioned a major incident that bears on both, especially because it shows something other anecdotes don't: that O'Keefe is willing to use subterfuge and mock his subjects even when there is no wrongdoing to uncover...

A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting documentary on BBC Radio 4 about Basing Street Studios (now SARM Studios) in London - the segment about Paul Kossoff and the Leslie speaker cabinet at the John Martyn session was particularly memorable.

I've just noticed that some kind person (Chris Gregory) has recorded and uploaded it to Soundcloud, complete with download link and everything, for anyone who might be interested :)

From the BBC website:
Critic and cultural commentator Paul Morley returns to the Basing Street Studios, home to Island Records and then his own ZTT label. These were the very rooms in which everyone from Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens and Bob Marley through to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Art of Noise and Grace Jones recorded some of their most iconic albums. In the company of Island's Chris Blackwell and ZTT's Trevor Horn, as well as legendary engineer Tony Platt, Paul attempts to find out what it was about this particular space that led to some of the most memorable recordings of the 70s and 80s.

Eyes perpetually glossed with the most addictive marijuana residues and spirits all but defunct, the mouths of naive Electronic Daisy raver chicks chirp open in sexual glee as they wait to be plied with more Tweetie Flipper’s liquid ecstasy induced acid trips.
As if parents need any more proof that this new ‘electronic dance’ rave cult is a great danger to our children, we now have shocking and sick headlines pouring in this morning from California.
The Mother’s Alert Network first tweeted today about violence erupting in West Hollywood, California. Police officers initially reported a massive, drug-fueled flash mob orgy that was actively taking place in West Hollywood. Shocked officials immediately called in the National Guard to assist LAPD in trying to contain the throbbing crowd by passive means, but after 9 officers were injured and one sodomized, police had to use rubber bullets and tear gas to gain control.
And today, after the smoke has settled, we’ve learned this event was called the Electric Daisy Carnival, a festival of drugs, sin and wanton carnality that makes Woodstock look like a Saturday Night at Mass.
If your child is a raver or fan of electronic base music, their risk of having an STD is already 23% higher than national average. Raver girls are notorious for being abortion-toking prostitutes, especially behind their parents backs. This is because people in this ‘electronic dance’ community are usually degenerates and drug addicts. The music of this culture is designed to trick the naive, malleable minds of teenagers to believe their high-school puppy love has meaning and they should shoot up with drugs and have adrenaline fueled public orgies, such as the massive Electronic Hoedown (Electric Daisy 2011) that victimized so many people yesterday in West Hollywood.
Headlining this year;s random fest were two dangerously geriatric, ‘original’ bands known as the Yellow Cake Magic Orchestra and even more terrifying, Throbbing Gristle. Reading through the resumes of these two death metal, Satan-worshiping bands is like reading the yearbook for Alcatraz class of 1938.
Everything about this year’s show would haunt the heart and minds of those not under the spell of this Satanic nightclub music. Yellow Cake Magic Orchestra is headlined by gruff looking men who look like extras from a 80s post-apocalypse biker movie. Their name comes from a 70s street drug called “Yellow Cake Magic”, a raunchy mix of crudely cut marijuana leaves, crack infused acid drops and Quaaludes, all baked into a yellow cake that will make the mind of any taster explode with a magical sexual desire.Electric Daisy, Hollywood, CA – Bloodstreams coursing with Yellow Cake Magic, once promising college students are turned into the smuttiest degenerates and have no respect for authority. Shocked LAPD officers flee as Electric Daisy ravers wildly throw their head back in deep sexual glee, stamping holes into police cars and preparing to strip off their clothing and furiously rub their bodies together, until a sexual climax is reached. And then they will only get more filthy from there.
Yellow Cake Magic starts every concert by forcing their ‘fans’ to have a bite of yellow-icing cake at the door, and dear readers, the cake is laced with the nastiest, most destructive drugs. As the Quaaludes take effect and make the eater’s body render itself loose and pliable at all orifices, the marijuana heightens sensuality and causes girls to become like cats in heat. The boys at the concert are stiff with sin at this point and the band plays loud, hypnotic electronic dance music that causes everyone to strip off their clothing and violate every sensible morality that a person should have.Overlooking the Electric Daisy Carnival, Photographer Captures Moment Old Man Reverse Sodomized by Group of Pert College Raver Girls – Police report one geriatric old man had his Depends stripped off and he was force-fed Viagral supplements and “Yellow Cake Magic”, then disappeared under a throbbing riot of thigh exposing girls, who gyrated and cheered all over the old man as the crowd took pictures. The man’s wife cried and fled the scene in her Cadillac. The whereabouts of the man is still unknown, him last being seen swallowed up deep within the mob of rioting bodies.
The ultimate organizer for this dastardly festival of simple-minded college children and poorly timed, unskilled computer music is another geriatric man known as DJ Kaskade. Notorious for producing the most mind-altering tones imaginable during the late 80s, Kaskade tweeted that the event would start at 6am in front of Mann’s Chinese theater. Only hours later, the feeble-minded DJ who organized this event was scared and begging for it to end. DJ Kaskade tweeted:

‘EVERYONE CHILL NOW!!! The block party has officially been shut down! BUT THIS IS TOO CRAZY AND WE NEED TO BE SAFE!’
‘I AM REALLY CONCERNED FOR EVERYONES SAFETY AT THIS POINT! PLEASE RELAX’
‘EVERYONE NEEDS TO GO HOME NOW! I DON’T WANT THIS TO REFLECT BADLY ON EDM OR WHAT WE ARE ABOUT. BE RESPECTFUL AND CHILL OUT!!!’ – DJ Kaskade, realizing Electric Dance music is now dangerous

Too late, DJ Kaskade. This event proves exactly what EDM is all about: marijuana addiction, acid drops and gyrating to poorly orchestrated music. Over 183 people were sodomized by drug-laced flesh glowsticks, the anguished screams of the fraternity boy victims soon loosening into mindless purrs and confused moans as the massively injected drugs kicked in.
Unknown to many, every new male electronic dance music raver must perform a “Throbbing Gristle” to be accepted into the moshing pits that are prevalent at these events. A Throbbing Gristle is considered complete once a raver, usually unpopular, black clad loners during high school, take revenge on the massive throngs of fraternity boys who cannot resist events such as this.
When coming into a Electric Daisy Carnival, the entry gates have Yellow Cake Magic and also an armband tagging system. Guys in Greek-lettered fraternity shirts are given green tags and told ‘free alcohol’ so they won’t question. Guys who identify as raver virgins are given a yellow armband, barring them from all the drugs and main orgy sections until they slip a roofie into an isolated fraternity guy and get a picture of themselves sodomizing him ‘to the gristle’. They take these pictures back to the main gate and then are accepted as a ‘raver bro’. It’s all sick and terrifying, but for the unsuspecting girls who come into this bizarre underground culture, it’s twice as worse.
LA Clinics are already reporting a 39% increase in girls aged 16 – 21 requesting free pregnancy kits. There is no coincidence that at these events, nearly 39% of the girls are knowingly engaged in unprotected sex. The other 61% are too drugged or slutty to know or care the next day. After last year’s Electric Daisy, 2/5 girls who went for the first time reported STDs and pregnancy from unknown causes. Their lives, broken.
After only several hours, an estimated 50,000 ravers had descended upon the Mann’s Chinese Theater grounds in Hollywood. Reports state students from as for as alcohol drenched UC Davis to the North and the always dangerously hipster raver Cal State Fullerton residents to the south brought massive ‘Mobile Party Unit” buses stocked with alcohol kegs and professional Tijuana Mexican strippers to ensure more debauchery.
Electronic music is dangerous because it is so easy to make. It is everywhere. Most of the “DJs” of the EDM scene are simple basement dwellers who have downloaded the recording program “Audacity” and another program called “Fruityloops”. The pioneers of the movement, a band called Death Dragon Opium Punch, was a bunch of simple overweight friends who got bored one night while playing Dungeons and Dragons, all during the mid-1980s.
Like their forefathers, the new DJs of EDM record their voices and make it buzzy using Audacity filters, then throw a random, poor sounding beat behind it with Fruity Loops. The music is poor by any industrial standard, but the beats are confusing, much like an acid trip ritual conducted by Satanic druid priests, so college students who experiment with drugs are naturally drawn to it. The music is called the ‘lullaby of the Satanic druggies’ for a reason and now, the culture is consuming our nation’s youth with pagan Islamic blood-letting rituals under the moon where Skittles parties give way to a night of confused memories and sore body openings.
The cult religions of Middle Eastern practice are prevalent at these events and the newest festival features The Five Pillars of Electronic Dance Music: kineticFIELD, circuitGROUNDS, cosmicMEADOW, bassPOD, neonGARDEN. It is by these pillar groups that EDM ravers segregate and stage moshing pits, fraternity boy savaging areas, anti-police barricades and finally the raunchy orgy pits where the bands perform. As of time of report, the National Guard was able to penetrate each level, or pillar, of the event.Painted priests of the EDM movement usually escort ‘attractive’ college-aged children to the backstage areas of Electric Daisy, where sloven band members await to ply them with drugs, electronic defling devices and flesh phallus’.
The following released image comes from the computer file of one raver planner, showing how the most destructive bands are placed into each herded area, where they will loosen the morals of your children and force them into horrible acts.
After being able to regroup, LA’s finest and the US military combined to engage the crowd of 50,000. With bands dramatically playing drummed and based music in the background, the drug-addicted minds of the ravers were defiant. An epic battle commenced in the cosmicMEADOW region.

The rippling muscles of the ravers tour through the law enforcement’s initial lines and defense. The new strains of marijuana smoke twice as strong as black methcocaine-LSD, causing the user’s hearts to wildly beat to a unwordly Satanic cadence. With these hulking, drug enhanced roid-raging beasts beating them and sodomizing yet another officer, the police had no choice but to form a defensive line and begin to fire rubber bullets upon the typically unruly EDM crowd.

After a long, grueling battle, the carnage was unreal. A body count of those drugged and sodomized is still not available, but estimates put nearly 840 non-ravers who were in the wrong place, wrong time, still missing and we can only fear the worse. This rave spilled into commercial areas where decent families and normal people live. We cannot fully understand the drug addicted minds of people in this community.After breeching the cosmicMEADOW grounds, police where then able to access the Hollywood Family Shopping Region that had been spontaneously consumed by the surging kineticFIELD crowds. As seen with homosexuals, ravers will victimize children as young as 18 or 19, making The Gap a target of their ‘virgin stealing’ ceremony. Police worked for hours to free hostages being forced to do raver drugs, groin licking and swaying to rhythmic Dubstep music.RescuedAfter a grueling, 18-hour ordeal, families emerge from The Gap after brave officers infiltrated the store and took on large groups of EDM ravers who were ‘drugged beyond all comprehension’, as one tearful mother recounted in her memoir. Her son was crowd-surfed from the store and was last seen wearing his new Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity lettersAftermath
The victim totals are still rolling in. The American Red Cross has not yet issued a disaster response, but national aide is imminent. Such destruction has not been seen in Los Angeles since the Watts riots, and those riots did not even feature sodomy or forced drug injections.
One onlooker wrote: “It is a macabre, fearful scene, as if the 1980s have reemerged and Michael Jackson is filming Thriller in my front lawn. Pale-faced teenaged children are creeping around, arms dripping blood from syringe holes as unholy, awful music fills the air all around. The air smells of dead tuna: the smell of a 3am Vegas prostitute’s bedsheets. Hell has unleashed on Earth and it goes by one name: Electronic Dance Music“.
As of time of report, police have fully contained the area and managed to kick most bands out or throw them in jail. Only a few stragglers, namely brothel moms trying to recruit new girls to be “Raver Girls”, remain.Mike Watson @'Christwire'

ROFL - must try to get up! No, I can't...ROFL!

When I do manage to stop laughing I am going to stick on 'Heathen Earth' and DO THE THROBBING GRISTLE...

If you're the leader of a loud, disorganized European hate group, you've probably figured out by now that the best way to recruit followers is the same way Ashton Kutcher does it: use Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace.
A lot.
The AP reports that European hate groups—including the English Defence League, an organization that Norway terror suspect Anders Behring Breivik claims to have communicated—are increasingly relying on social networking sites like Facebook to recruit members.
In just two years, EDL membership has shot up from a few dozen to more than 10,000, a dramatic increase that EDL leader Stephen Lennon attributes to popular websites, as well as underground online fora. The AP has the interview:

I knew that social networking sites were the way to go…[b]ut to say that we inspired this lunatic to do what he did is wrong. We've never once told our supporters [it's] alright to go out and be violent.

Lennon, who was sentenced to "community rehabilitation" in England this week for inciting and leading an EDL street fight, isn't the only far-right (or far-left, or far-anything) organizer using Facebook for maximum publicity or reach. All sorts of anti-Muslim and racist cliques have been greatly supplementing their blog-based fulminations with modern social media, and they often do so unimpeded because sites like Facebook claim to uphold "the sharing of controversial ideas and opinions." (Facebook's methods for selecting what stays and what gets pulled frequently seem, well, curious: for instance, Holocaust denial stays, but UK labor strikes get the boot.)
It's not all bad news. Buried in the AP report is a short paragraph on law enforcement's mixed feelings regarding the groups' online recruitment:

Intelligence and law enforcement officials have mixed feelings about the sites. On one hand, they recognize the potential for recruiting groups or individuals into violent movements. On the other, the sites allow officials to track and catch perpetrators. Germany's interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, told local media this week that he's more worried about extremists who go underground and "radicalize in secret."

That's a good point. When white nationalists and "racial realists" start pumping out tweets and web comments, it makes them much easier to locate. A trail of un-deletable evidence comes in handy when you want to prosecute someone for crimes against humanity.Asawin Suebsaeng @'Mother Jones'

“Fuck” is a 2006 scholarly paper by Ohio State U law prof Christopher M. Fairman, published in Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies Working Paper Series No. 39. It starts with anecdotes about three legally trained people — a Master’s student in law, a sheriff, and a federal judge — reacting irrationally to the word “fuck,” and goes on to explore the way that psycholinguistic factors makes English speakers go crazy in the presence of the word, and the effect that has had on law. Fun reading..!

Last night, when President Obama addressed the nation about the debt ceiling, and Speaker of the House John Boehner responded, there was an overwhelming sense of deadlock: Obama pointed at House Republicans for refusing to compromise; Boehner shot back that the President was irresponsibly seeking a “blank check.” (Amy Davidson has more on the speeches.) The frustration on both sides was palpable. Since music soothes the savage Congress, we thought that there might be some songs to help both Democrats and Republicans get through this crisis. At the very least, they can’t hurt. (Note: We couldn’t find any songs that had the word “loggerheads” in the lyrics.)

Marvin Gaye, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” (1962)

President Obama was just a year old when Gaye had his first major Motown hit with this song. The lyrics aren’t specifically about the debt ceiling: they are a declaration of romantic persistence. At the time of the song’s release, the debt was a relatively paltry $250 billion...

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart, which came out in paperback on July 19th. I first became aware of Febos because we are both women writers in recovery for drug addiction. Her book intrigued me because it’s about her four-year stint as a dominatrix in a dungeon in Manhattan’s Midtown, as well as her drug use and recovery, and anything that combines sexuality – particularly the stranger aspects – with drugs sounds like a good read to me. And Whip Smart was – surprisingly so. I expected it to be interesting, funny, and strange, and it was indeed all of these things. But I was pleased to discover that Febos’ book was more than an amusing chronicle of shocking events. Instead, she meticulously questioned and analyzed the motives and driving factors behind her own actions, as well as those of her clients and coworkers. And this unflinching eye was at once empathetic and unforgiving – which, of course, is a difficult line to walk – ultimately making Whip Smart a rewarding and touching first book that is, as Darin Strauss said, “a true story (in both senses of the word).” I recently interviewed Febos about the book, as well as the novel she’s currently working on...

The Metropolitan Police has been granted another three days to question the suspected hacker arrested on the Shetland Islands yesterday.
A spokeswoman for the Met said: "We've successfully applied to Horseferry Road Magistrates Court for a warrant to keep him for another three days. He is British and we are not looking for anyone else."

The 18-year old, reportedly 'topiary' a major figure in LulzSec and Anonymous, was arrested yesterday in an intelligence-led operation by Met police and the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and Lincolnshire Police.

Mystery deepened overnight with suggestions that police had been tricked into arresting the wrong guy.
Meanwhile the Scotsman reports confusion on the islands about his identity. The paper said everyone in the town of Scalloway, population 812, or presumably 811 now, had heard the rumours but most believed he was not originally from the Islands and there were even rumours he could be German.
Police landed in a light aircraft before grabbing their man and leaving.John Oates @'The Register'

Glenn Mulcaire has already expressed his sincere regret to those who have been hurt and affected by his activities and he repeats that apology most sincerely.
He was effectively employed by News of the World from 2002 to carry out his role as a private investigator.
As he accepted when he pleaded guilty in 2007 to charges of phone interception he admits that his role did include phone hacking. As an employee he acted on the instructions of others.
There were also occasions when he understood his instructions were from those who genuinely wished to assist in solving crimes. Any suggestion that he acted in such matters unilaterally is untrue. In the light of the ongoing police investigation, he cannot say any more.